("Mrs. Dalloway")

[fiefoe]

Virginia Woolf's writing goes to places that I can't always follow.

• what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
• a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There!
• In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
• she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
• For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.
• She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
• How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think.
• did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
• being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
• it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings,
• all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it,
• as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love!
• when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.
• yet in its fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire.
• let rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of
• who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing—poor
• he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty!
• To love makes one solitary, she thought.
• the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again.
• to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity.
• soaring over Greenwich and all the masts; over the little island of grey churches, St.
• how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are,
• one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments
• Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
• the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching,
• Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow.
• “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!
• That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre,
• So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.
• was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day.
• as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy
• still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.
• had left, like a bee with honey, laden with the moment.
• I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was
• there were moments when civilisation, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their security. Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought.
• Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
• To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy.
• then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink;
• women’s rights (that antediluvian topic),
• With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.
• Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.